Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Dorathen Better Late Then Never

Sameer Callahan It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

gfyoung-83-638228 Good movie but I would guess there were more gunshots in this movie than any other, at least that I have ever seen.

Bill Slocum "These few dollars you lose here today, they're gonna buy you stories to tell your children and your great-grandchildren."Thus John Dillinger (Warren Oates) introduces himself to a bank full of cowering citizens and to us the audience. He wants us to know that he's doing a service with this robbery by gracing us with his celebrity.If the rest of the movie was as clever and gripping at its first 90 seconds, "Dillinger" would be remembered today as a first-rate crime movie, instead of a chaotic pit stop by one of the wildest and most singular characters of the auteur era, John Milius. With all it has going for it, you want "Dillinger" to be more than it ever manages to be.Milius loved violence in films. "Dillinger" is a raucous epic of criminal violence inspired by then-recent bad-guy films like "Bonnie And Clyde" and "Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid." It's clear from the casting of Oates and of Ben Johnson as Dillinger's nemesis Melvin Purvis that the film he really wanted to make was "The Wild Bunch." It's here "Dillinger" falls apart."Wild Bunch" is a movie about bad men where loyalty and interpersonal relationships dominate until the bloody end. You see them as people running out of options and care about them enough that what happens to them matters. "Dillinger" is in such a hurry to get to the bloodshed that it sidesteps the characterization until it's too late. Dillinger is surrounded by henchmen, but most of them are just there for the stunts and squibs. The only person he has any time for is a woman he assaults until she loves him, Billie Frechette (Michelle Phillips). Watching him holler at her as she screams and cries is exhausting, and pretty much all you get from Milius the scriptwriter in the way of relationship development."He lets himself go too easily," is how one of his more thoughtful henchmen, Pierpont (Geoffrey Lewis), explains it. Whether roughing up Billie or another hood with an even more dangerous reputation than himself, "Baby Face" Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss), Dillinger as played by Oates is all snarling brawn and no brains.The violence here is visceral and energetic, but it doesn't serve much of a purpose. Ultimately, all that Dillinger, and "Dillinger," is about is celebrity. Even Peckinpah didn't work in so nihilistic a vein."I'm already a murderer, so I might as well be famous," declares prisoner Reed Youngblood (Frank McRae) when running off with Dillinger. Later, after Dillinger's fatal date at the Biograph Theater, Milius lingers on a shot of a woman dipping her kerchief on a bloody wall, symbolizing fame of a sort.Johnson does provide a strong presence, even if Milius can't decide whether he's supposed to be a decent man or a glory hound. Perhaps he is a bit of both. Celebrity works both ways in this game. At least with Johnson, you have a character you can understand at some level, who understands the symbolic importance of stopping a famous criminal and pulls you in in his unshowy way. Oates, a great actor, doesn't have himself a great part here, and it shows in the way his characterization meanders from that of a gentleman robber to a vicious killer.Being Milius, you get some good lines amid the carnage. There are also some well-shot scenes of bucolic beauty by Jules Brenner which stand out more for the absence of anything interesting going on. Dillinger buries a comrade and talks about Jesse James; Dillinger and Billie ponder a run to Mexico before returning to his life of crime. A life of sound and fury, signifying nothing, except celebrity, which is in "Dillinger" turns out the biggest nothing of all.

Lechuguilla G-man Melvin Purvis (Ben Johnson) chases bank robber John Dillinger (Warren Oates) high and low, in this Depression-era action flick that's heavy on gunfights and short on character development. Throughout the film, a herd of other public enemies, including Harry Pierpont, Homer Van Meter, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, among others, stampede the plot, diverting us away from Dillinger the man. It's as if all these hoodlums suddenly exploded on the scene, without benefit of a childhood or motivation of any kind, and one of these hoodlums just happened to be Dillinger.Multiple shootouts go on and on and on. Bang, bang, bang ... dying bodies jerk, squirm, twitch, and lurch, with lots of blood. Antiquated autos zoom away at twenty miles an hour, tip over, crash, and blow-up. And Purvis smokes lots of cigars.Another irritation is the casting of Warren Oates. He looks way too old to play Dillinger. An unknown, younger actor would have been more convincing.On the other hand, the film's color cinematography and terrific production design create an authentic 1930s look and feel, helped along by era songs, like "Red River Valley" and "Happy Days Are Here Again". The outdoor scenes, especially, with those dirt roads and cheap frame rural houses, convey a dreary, lonesome, forlorn mood, totally in keeping with the poverty and hopelessness of that period.My impression of this film is similar to that of the more recent Dillinger film "Public Enemies" (2009). Both films lack focus on Dillinger. Both get carried away with action. And both do a great job with the Depression-era style. That is to say, in "Public Enemies" and in "Dillinger", the strength is the visuals; the weakness is mainly the script.

ca_skunk The scene at the beginning of the film where the old man at the gas station treats Homer Van Meter with such contempt is hilarious.Billie Frechette is shown firing a gun at the feds in one scene; it didn't happen. The end credits say she died a spinster; she was married twice. Harry Pierpont was wounded in an attempted escape from death row; three weeks later he was still unable to walk (he'd been shot four times), so they carried him to the electric chair, strapped him in, and threw the switch.Pretty Boy Floyd was wounded running from the farmhouse, but the wound wasn't mortal. When Purvis asked him about Kansas City, Floyd let go such a stream of profanity that Purvis had Agent Herman Hollis shoot him with a Thompson. Hollis had fired one of the rounds that hit Dillinger (although not the fatal one), and he and another agent died while mortally wounding Baby Face Nelson in November of that year.The scene outside the Biograph is ridiculous. It was scalding hot, which is why Dillinger and the two women went to an air-conditioned theater. The movie shows everyone in overcoats, including Dillinger. He had on an open-collared shirt and a white straw hat. Purvis didn't shoot Dillinger at all; the fatal round was fired by an agent brought up from Texas.I do, however, love the line about Handsome Jack Klutas (who, by the way, attended college, but had no "college degree"): "I knew I'd never take him alive. I didn't try too hard, neither." That scene, of course, never happened. Purvis wasn't even there when Klutas was killed.